Copywriter | Marketing & Optimization Consultant | Customer Advocate
You’ve got an email list. It’s even growing at a steady pace.
Yay you.
You may even have a welcome sequence set up so your new subscribers hear from you over the next few days.
Fantastic.
What happens after that?
(Crickets…)
Yeah, that’s a problem.
[Read more…]Last week I talked about the end of your lead generation funnel, the welcome sequence emails.
(Well, okay, I talked about templates and gave you a set of welcome sequence email templates.)
This week I want to look closer to the beginning of your lead generation funnel.
The lead magnet or opt-in bribe.
This is the piece of information you offer in trade for someone’s email address.
And in order for it to attract your ideal audience, it needs to be something they actually want.
[Read more…]
A few weeks ago, I learned about a new tool called GoViral. It’s put out by Growth Tools, which is run by Bryan Harris of Videofruit. The best part? It’s free! Don’t worry, there’s a link to get your own account at the end of this post. Or, if you’re absolutely desperate to see how it works right now, click on the button below.
The idea behind this tool is you give away a lead magnet in trade for having people give you exposure to their friends, social media followers, etc.
Yes, this is a really standard method of growing your audience. But Bryan Harris and his team have made this ridiculously easy to use, and to track.
More importantly, they’ve made it ridiculously easy for people to share your lead magnets with their networks. It’s awesome.
I decided to experiment with GoViral to see how it works and what results I got from it.
Please note: My experiments are far from scientific, or thorough. But even this little foray into playing with this tool will show you how well this tool works.
Here’s what I did…
I have a very modest email list, which I email every weekday. (Even copywriters should get time off.)
GoViral gives the option to share on several social media and blogging platforms. So, I asked my email subscribers to share one of my old blog posts on their Facebook walls.
If you’re on my email list, you’ll recognize the email I sent below. If not, you really should be. Sign up here, or subscribe via the popup box at the bottom, right corner of this window.
Subject line: Would you share this for me please?
Hi there,
I’m testing out a new tool to grow your email list. I want to see how it works for me, then I’ll report back here next week.
The best thing about this particular tool? It’s free!
The best thing about this test? I’ll give you an awesome cheat sheet to build a better relationship with your potential customers.
Here’s what I need you to do:
Collect your Customer Relationship Cheat Sheet after you’ve shared the blog post.
Tune in next Wednesday when I tell you the results of this experiment.
Thanks very much!
Tanya
To be fair, I really wasn’t done playing around with this tool yet, so I didn’t report in the next Wednesday. Instead, I’m reporting in the following Wednesday, via this blog post.
Of the 39 people who read my email, 6 of them shared the blog post.
That may not seem like a lot, and I did mention, my email list is small.
The results were noticeable.
My Facebook post reached 298 people. (I don’t know why Facebook registers this post as having been shared 5 times instead of 6, but there you are.)
Now, compare that to my last blog post, which only reached 80 people, and wasn’t shared at all.
Or this one from last year, which only reached 22 people, with no shares.
This is why GoViral is so effective. You get more exposure by sharing with your current audience, and asking them to share with their audience, and so on and so on and so on. (Which is why it’s called GoViral.)
Personally, I’m thrilled with the results, even though they’re small so far.
Again, if you’re on my email list, you know that I performed this past weekend at the Carleton Artist Lofts Spring St. Paul Art Crawl.
All week long, one post a day, I posted Facebook Lives of some of the songs I’d be performing at this show and asked folks to share them with GoViral to get more exposure for my performance and for the Art Crawl itself. I offered 2 different free songs as lead magnets for 4 posts during the week. (Okay, I missed a day because of unexpected scheduling conflicts.)
The first Facebook live post I shared got 3 shares via GoViral. (Looks like some folks shared without clicking on the GoViral link, which is fine by me.) This post was shared a total of 8 times (according to Facebook), reached 568 people and got 243 views.
My second Facebook Live post was only shared once by GoViral (which was probably me) but according to Facebook, it got 4 shares, which netted 107 views and reached 319 people.
The third Facebook Live post got 3 GoViral shares, 5 total on Facebook, and reached 310 people. It was viewed 96 times.
My fourth and final Facebook Live post that was shared via GoViral only once (again, probably me) but got a total of 5 shares on Facebook, had 93 views and reached 239 people.
Now, compare this to the Facebook Live I did at the show itself, which I didn’t offer a GoViral download for. That one reached 142 people and was only viewed 57 times. And I know I’m the only person who shared it.
Now granted, the longer a post is out in circulation, the more it will be viewed and shared. The first post had a full week from the day this blog post was written to get more views, shares and reach more people, compared to the last post, which I apparently forgot to share myself until today.
By the way, if you want to hear any of these, visit my music Facebook page.
There are a lot of things that will affect how much exposure any given Facebook post will get, including how many people know you and/or like what you’re doing, so they view or share your post for those reasons, versus just sharing a post because they thought it was cool.
But the fact remains that the posts that were shared via GoViral did much better than the one that wasn’t, for this test.
Again, I do not claim that this test was scientific, accurate or precise. It is me playing around with a new tool. But it’s a really fun new tool!
So, here’s the cool thing. You can share pretty much any digital lead magnet, including:
You do need a place to store your downloads online, GoViral doesn’t store them for you. But that’s pretty easy to set up. To be candid, I’ve got mine in a Google Drive folder. You can also use your website or other online storage like Dropbox.
Here is the list of places you can share lead magnets with GoViral.
You’ll notice at the bottom you can have someone email a friend or send them to a specific URL, which is a great way to share sales announcements, landing pages, your website and more.
Personally, I can see dozens of uses for this tool, for my clients’ businesses and for my own.
Once you’ve signed up for your free account, you do have to add a tracking script to your website. That way you can see how many people share a lead magnet or landing page on your site. Instructions for doing that are on the GoViral website.
Next, you click on the bright orange button on the main page that says Create Campaign.
Now, choose your goal for this campaign from the list.
You customize the landing page for your visitors and add the name of the bonus (or bonuses) they’ll receive for sharing.
Click on “more options” to add your own background image and change the overlay color to your preference. You can also create a “No Thanks” message and link to another page to give people a way to decline to share and still get another message, if you want to take them to a final Thank You page or another page on your website.
Next, you’ll choose the call to action you want to use, as per the dropdown menu above. You’ll link to the page or post you want to share and (depending on your CTA) choose the advanced settings to verify that someone has shared your post.
Finally, you’ll customize your download page by adding the link to your downloadable item(s). You can even add a special “Ghost Item” as an extra bonus.
Once you click “Next,” you’ll have the link to your GoViral campaign. You get the option of a standard link, which you can hide behind text or a button, or a “pretty link” which you can leave exposed. FYI, I used the “pretty link” option for all of my Facebook Live posts.
Add that link wherever you need to, including:
You can create multiple campaigns, depending on what you want to share and how you want to share it. You can duplicate a campaign, which makes it easy if you want to share the same lead magnet with different CTAs (so you can share it on different social media platforms, for example.)
By the way, the customer support folks at Growth Tools are fantastic and will help you get up and running ASAP.
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t give you a content upgrade for this post. So I’ll give you a checklist of steps and marketing collateral you’ll need to set up a GoViral campaign.
After you opt-in for this content upgrade, you will be asked to share this post with your audience to get another lead magnet, my Lead Magnet Idea List. So, you’ll see how this works in the real world.
Finally, you’ll be taken to the GoViral website, so you can sign up for your own free account.
Click on the button below to get your free setup checklist and see GoViral in action.
